Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  So it was that, in July 2008, I found myself in the archives of the University of British Columbia, where I was patiently sifting through boxes and voluminous files from the Jane Rule Fonds. In one of the boxes, I found the manuscript for Taking My Life, written in her hand on yellow foolscap paper. I was startled: it had not been cited in the catalogue of her papers. As a researcher, I frequently rifle through the contents of archival boxes, in spite of what a catalogue promises (or denies). That practice did not detract from my surprise. There was a catalogued version of it that had been typed, against which I later checked my transcription and which I have used to shape the autobiography published here; the typed version had subsequently added mostly small changes that amounted to about thirty to forty pages of extra material, but it was the handwritten original text that held my attention. If there were other drafts that had preceded the latter, she did not preserve them; since Rule saved most of her papers, including early drafts of both her literary work and letters, I was inclined to approach this manuscript as if it had been an early, if not the very first, attempt. Even if it was an early attempt, I marvelled: the scarcely marked-up yellow foolscap manuscript demonstrated the kind of confidence and precision with which she wrote. Very little editing had been done in her hand and very few insertions and deletions had been made. She wrote with a self-assurance that was reminiscent of the way she spoke.

  The process of preparing the manuscript involved transcribing the handwritten version, then checking it against the typescript. What has been published here is the typescript of Taking My Life—the version that seems to be the last one that Rule wrote. For the sake of scholars whose research expertise encompasses autobiography theory, book history and other areas of literary and critical theory, I have included passages that were omitted from or added to the typescript in a section titled “Omitted Text.” Discussions related to two other editorial matters also arose between Ann-Marie Metten, Talon’s eagle-eyed editor, the executors and me: whether or not changes should be made to dated language and whether or not to include breaks in the text. Rule made references to other races (specifically, Asian) in a manner that would these days be considered politically incorrect; yet, as one executor noted, since Rule was reporting the usage of either language by children at the time or the dialogue of her relatives, and since such usage was a reflection of the period, it was best to allow such language to remain. Conversely, the executors gave us permission to excise some equally dated terminology related to the Indigenous. The conversation then turned to the consideration of some section breaks, which Rule had clearly flagged in her typescript, but inconsistently so; Ann-Marie rendered these breaks with greater regularity and consistency.

  Approximately 260 pages in length after my transcription of it had been completed, the manuscript was captivating not only because it was written in Rule’s hand, but also because of the characteristic and disarming frankness of her prose, her engaging and straightforward style. She had written other autobiographical texts,1. some published and others still in the archives, some focusing on her later career and others on aspects of her childhood. Many of the essays in Loving the Difficult (2008), for example, delineate family members and her interaction with them, or childhood experiences of importance to Rule; however, Taking My Life is uncharacteristic in its extended focus upon the entirety of her childhood through to her maturity into adulthood. As she herself notes in the manuscript, “I have never been able to use the years of my adolescence. In the great range of characters in novels and short stories, it is as if people between the ages of thirteen and fifteen didn’t exist. And I not only lived through those years but taught students that age for two years with comprehension and delight.”

  In general, Rule eschewed protracted autobiographical forms in her own writing practices, for reasons in part related to discretion; as she noted in a letter dated May 12, 1981, addressed to Robert Weaver, the memoir “isn’t usually something I do.” The text that she had characterized as a memoir and that she had sent to him at that time, she claimed, was merely “an exercise for me in preparation for teaching that form.”2. She regarded autobiography and fiction, moreover, as discrete genres; so she observed in another letter to Weaver, “the proper place for autobiography is in an autobiography, not in fiction.”3. That it is not “something she usually did” is perhaps revealed in the fact that Taking My Life seems to have been written in the late 1980s, as the scholar Marilyn Schuster also suggests,4. just before Rule retired from writing. By that time, her arthritis had become a painful impediment to her professional work. Writing this manuscript might have been her way of considering the origins of her successful literary career as it moved to closure. In a letter to a friend, written in 1994 as she and her partner Helen Sonthoff cleaned out their basement “half an hour at a time,” Rule reported that “old age has its strategies”:5. that is, writing the autobiography may have been one of those very strategies of grappling with her aging because, as she notes in the introductory paragraph with an unmistakable sense of resignation, “there is nothing else to do.”

  Taking My Life may be properly defined as an autobiography, because its subject is Rule herself and her world, as she constructs it with her passionate intellect. In examining the years of her childhood and adolescence, she looks intensely at family dynamics, tracks the emergence of her sexual life and alludes to the beginnings of her writing career. The manuscript thus struck me as bearing literary importance and cultural significance, because it traces the first twenty-one years of Rule’s life and her development as a writer. As such, it operates like a Künstlerroman: that is, the storyline follows its prescribed narrative arc, from childhood to adulthood, and sheds light on those figures who were key to her moral, intellectual, artistic and sexual development. If we accept it as a Künstlerroman, it becomes evident why Rule would conclude Taking My Life with her twenty-first birthday: she had come of age, and had grown into her calling as a professional writer and mature adult. On the one hand, then, her autobiography is revealing of the politics of the era, from the 1930s to the 1950s; on the other hand, it probes in emotional and intellectual terms the larger moral questions that were to preoccupy Rule for the rest of her literary career, and showcases the origins of, and the milieu that gave shape to, her rich and vibrant intellectual life.

  The title itself is resonant, even haunting, especially when contextualized within an understanding of Rule’s rigorous editorial practices and her lifelong struggle to protect her freedom of expression and literary integrity. In her relationships with agents, editors and publishers, she was unflinching about her expectations: no word, no comma, no seemingly trivial part of the text could be touched without her permission. This tendency accounted for my deep surprise at finding the original manuscript of Taking My Life in the archives—and later, my deep anxiety as I began transcribing it. I wanted to respect the manuscript as I had found it, yet I was compelled to ask: how is it that Rule would leave an autobiography—the kind of text that is arguably the most consummate expression of self-agency, of autonomy, of the assertion of one’s personal moral vision—unpublished and vulnerable to the editorial clutches of others, including, in this case, my own? An act of discretion on her part reveals itself here: in allowing for the possibility for the manuscript to be published long after it was written, she was also considering the ethical question related to those whose lives might have been affected by being represented in her work. The title sheds light on another possible answer to the question of why the manuscript remained unpublished in her lifetime: in writing about her early formative years, she is indeed “taking” or capturing her life, measuring it, assessing its pleasurable and painful contours, and accounting for how and why her life evolved as it did. Rule must have appreciated the implications of the title she chose. She was “taking her life,” with all its implications of suicide: she gave up a literary rendering of her life to critical scrutiny and, in so doing, she allowed herself to be vulnerable to the interpretative critiqu
es of her readers, academic and otherwise. In the introductory paragraph to Taking My Life, she suggests that its writing “may be a positive way” of assessing her life and rendering it to critical scrutiny, but the “may” she includes also suggests some measure of doubt. Positive or negative, Rule ultimately decides to write the autobiography, because “I may be able to learn to value my life as something other than the hard and threateningly pointless journey it has often seemed.” This remark seems rather uncharacteristic for Rule, in whose fiction deep sorrow is often flanked by or intermingled with deep joy and even celebration, and in whose essays her voice is rather more feisty than despondent. Perhaps a function of her debilitating arthritis in the last years of her life, her sense of resignation is countered by the act of will the writing of her autobiography itself represents. Indeed, in transcribing this autobiography, I am asserting my own belief that her life was far from pointless.

  She opens Taking My Life with perhaps the most traditional of autobiographical beginnings—her birth. On March 28, 1931, Jane Vance Rule was born in Westfield, a neighbourhood of Plainfield, New Jersey. She was the younger of two children, until her sister, Libby, was born. Rule recollects her early years with her older brother, Arthur, and her younger sister; her parents and extended family; and the homes and places of which she was fond. She tracks the litany of residences her family occupied, and their travels across the country for the sake of her father’s employment. Her parents had initially lived with her father’s parents in Westfield, a neighbourhood of Plainfield, in a house known as the “Shingle Chateau,”6. from which they moved to their own house, referred to as the “Gatehouse.” From there, they moved to California, where they rented an apartment on Harrison Street in Palo Alto; then they moved again to 727 Cowper Street, where Rule reminisced about how they “began real life as a family.” In the summers, they went to her beloved South Fork, which was located on the south fork of the Eel River in Humboldt County, California.7. The “official name” for South Fork was Paradise Ranch, so named by her great-grandfather, John Macgregor Vance, who bought it but renamed it because it “was their farthest summer outpost from Eureka, California, the town in which [her] great grandfather was president of a bank, a railroad, and owner of extensive property.” The regular summer home was closer to Eureka at Carlotta, “a widening in the road with stone and lumber mill named for [her] grandmother,” Carlotta Mae Vance.8. From California, when Rule was nine years of age, her family moved again to Hinsdale, twenty miles west of Chicago; then again to “Circle Drive” in Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis; and then temporarily to 1111 Hamilton Street in Palo Alto, California, with the Packers, her mother’s mother and stepfather. At this point, Rule’s father had rejoined the navy, just after the Second World War began, at the urging of his classmates from the class of 1926 at the U.S. Naval Academy. From Palo Alto, they moved nearby to Orinda, California, where her father had been assigned to head up the pre-flight school at St. Mary’s College.9. He was then assigned sea duty; when his commitment to the U.S. Navy was over, Rule’s father returned from the Aleutians—the islands from which Japanese-American and Unangax civilians were removed and interned.

  In the midst of a peripatetic upbringing, Rule recollects charming anecdotes of childhood pleasures—such as the trout fishing, swimming, hiking, huckleberry and fruit picking at South Fork—and stories of childhood mischief. The former manifested itself in her literary passion for nature and her sense of connection to the environment, both of which were powerfully formed during this period.10. The latter displays Rule in early possession of a keen sense of justice, what she described as “moral communism”: her unswerving sense of logic that manifested itself in the manner in which she already questioned societal rules or assignments in elementary and secondary school systems. Such questioning, she notes, lacked the instinctive tactfulness of her brother, who “never made the blundering comments that were to become my trademark; yet he couldn’t distinguish between what had happened and what he made up…I suspect it was I, a moral primitive, who first called him a liar. I had a passion for getting things straight.”

  As Rule delineates her childhood experiences, she also alludes to the complex layers of the cultural, economic and racial politics in the United States at the time: the family’s “black servant,” Josephine, who later returned home to die of consumption; the Filipino boarding house beside which the Rule family lived; and the friends who drew away from her family during hard times but rematerialized when the swinging financial circumstances of the Rule family improved. Even by definition of his own conservative Southern background, Rule’s father might not have “escaped a sense of horror at exposing his own children to the multiracial population of our own neighbourhood school”; yet, these kinds of racist practices and intolerance were not to be part of Rule’s familial legacy.

  By the emergence of the Second World War, racial tensions flared, and Rule was exposed to such tensions both at home and on the playground. Her father read to her from the evening newspaper about the Japanese involvement in the Second World War. Yet on the school playground, Rule befriended a Chinese-American student named Wally, and another, a Japanese-American student named Chiaki. They initially performed and diffused such racial tensions by dividing up into “opposing mixed teams at recess, called the Japs and the Chinks”: “We knew that, in the grown-up world, the Japs were bad and the Chinks were good, but those two boys, best friends, were equally liked.” The friendship between the two boys, Rule observes, later regrettably crumbled under the increasing hostilities of the Second World War: when she returned to Palo Alto High in California, she encountered Wally there again and inquired after Chiaki. He disturbingly responded with a grim sense of flippancy, “He got sent to concentration camp with all the other Japs.”

  Given such tensions and her own growing awareness of how her sexual interests were located outside the bounds of heteronormativity, it is perhaps not surprising to discover the litany of phobias, sometimes paralyzing, that Rule had to overcome: fear of the dark, what she called “night fears”; fear of heights; fear of being displaced by another move; fear of socially awkward situations; and fear, or rather the “familiar terror,” of yet another new school. In one momentous passage, she describes how she threw herself into a stormy night in order to overcome her fear of the dark:

  Too old now to call out to my parents with fake requests for drinks of water and more blankets, ashamed of the childish fantasies that terrified me, one night I got up, put on my shoes and a coat over my pyjamas, and went out the French doors onto the patio … It was a wild night, wind pushing broken clouds across the face of a bright moon, setting the trees to dancing. I was not victim to it now but part of the spirit of the storm. I began to run, intoxicated with the energy in me and all around me. I ran the full circle of the lake, came home and slept. I was never afraid of the dark again. I had taken it into my nature.

  These courageous encounters with her own fears bred a kind of fierceness and resilience that would later serve her writing career well, as she unswervingly negotiated the terms of contracts and refused to compromise the moral vision of her work.

  That kind of fierceness also characterized her loyalties to family members, particularly to her mother, with whom she seemed to be most close. She and her brother were named after their parents: Jane and Arthur. Whereas her parents were harmoniously inclined, by Rule’s account of things, the relationship between her and her brother was discordant. Only sixteen months apart, she and her brother were in early childhood “central to each other”; however, their differences became increasingly pronounced. They initially played, and later even took ballroom-dancing classes together, but they grew distant, to the point of being hostile with each other as they approached their teenage years. From such disconnection, Rule experienced a sense of deep loss: “I didn’t know how to replace or find for myself all that had gone from me in the broken bond with my brother, who felt required to root out of himself the gentleness that
had linked us.” It was a link that seemingly was broken for all family members; eventually, neither her mother nor her father was able to connect with their son, whose behaviour rendered the family increasingly distraught. Sometimes, he did not appear at home for days at a time and no family member knew where he was to be found.

  In particular, Arthur’s relationship with his father was competitive, markedly different from the attitude Rule’s father fostered toward her. Their father’s protracted absence, the result of wartime commitments, did not alleviate the tensions with Arthur, although his return from the war intensified them. He believed that he could reason with his son, could enjoy “man-to-man talks”—but these, Rule notes, were “wishful thinking” on her father’s part. One way of accounting for Arthur’s behaviour is suggested by Rule’s own sense that many of her father’s “tests for [Arthur] seemed designed to humiliate.” Yet Rule also recalls with some degree of pain that her father would compare their report cards and chide him “with half [of Jane’s] effort you could do twice as well.”

  Scholastically, Arthur was indeed considered, on the one hand, “unusually gifted,” but, on the other hand, frequently “in trouble at school,” and then in trouble with the police. He became sullen, detached and irresponsible in his dealings with his family; at last, his parents sent him to a private school in southern California, but he left it before the term was out. He joined the army, but was discharged and, upon his return, made an attempt to work for his father. He married one of Rule’s friends, Edy Mori, and directly before the ceremony made a comment to his sister that revealed the competitive nature with which he viewed their relationship: “You can run your heart out, but I can beat you standing still.” At times, there were teachers who expected the same behaviour of Jane as they did of her brother; in one instance, she found a message from one of her teachers on her desk, “Arthur Rule’s Pig Pen Taken Over by Jane Rule.” She found herself negotiating relationships with teachers over and over again because of the precedent set by her brother. The birth of Libby, her youngest sibling, may not have altered Arthur’s increasing distance, but it removed the pressure Rule experienced, until then, by being the youngest child.